Guernica (Picasso)

Guernica (Spanish: [ɡeɾˈnika], Basque: [ɡernika]) is a large oil painting on canvas by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso completed in June 1937.[1][2] Now in the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, the gray, black, and white painting was done at Picasso's home in Paris. It is regarded by many art critics as one of the most moving and powerful anti-war paintings in history,[3] and is one of Picasso's best known works.

Standing at 3.49 meters (11 ft 5 in) tall and 7.76 meters (25 ft 6 in) wide, the painting shows the suffering of people and animals wrenched by violence and chaos. Prominent in the composition are a gored horse, a bull, screaming women, dismemberment, and flames.

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In January 1937, the Spanish Republican government commissioned Picasso to create a large mural for the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris World's Fair. He lived in Paris, on Rue des Grands Augustins, and had been named Honorary Director-in-Exile of the Prado Museum. Picasso had last visited Spain in 1934, and would never return.[5]

Picasso worked somewhat dispassionately from January until late April on the project's initial sketches, depicting his perennial theme of an artist's studio.[1] Then, immediately upon hearing reports of the 26 April bombing of Guernica, the poet Juan Larrea visited Picasso and urged him to make the bombing his subject.[1] A few days later, on 1 May, Picasso read George Steer's eyewitness account of the bombing.[6] He then abandoned his initial idea, acted on Larrea's suggestion, and began to sketch a series of preliminary drawings for Guernica.[7]

During the Spanish Civil War Guernica, a town in the province of Biscay in Basque Country, was seen as the northern bastion of the Republican resistance movement and the center of Basque culture. This added to its significance as a target.[8] The Republican forces were made up of assorted factions (communists, socialists, anarchists, and others) with differing goals, but united in their opposition to the Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco, who sought a return to pre-Republican Spain based on law, order, and traditional Catholic values.[9]

When the first Junkers squadron arrived, there was smoke already everywhere (from the VB [VB/88] which had attacked with 3 aircraft); nobody would identify the targets of roads, bridge, and suburb, and so they just dropped everything right into the center. The 250s toppled a number of houses and destroyed the water mains. The incendiaries now could spread and become effective. The materials of the houses: tile roofs, wooden porches, and half-timbering resulted in complete annihilation. Most inhabitants were away because of a holiday; a majority of the rest left town immediately at the beginning [of the bombardment]. A small number perished in shelters that were hit."[11]

Other accounts state that Guernica's inhabitants were congregated in the center of town, as it was market day, and when the bombardment started they were unable to escape because the roads were full of debris and the bridges leading out of town had been destroyed.

Guernica in ruins, 1937

Guernica was 10 kilometers from the front lines and between the front lines and Bilbao, the capital of Bizkaia (Biscay), and any Republican retreat towards Bilbao or any Nationalist advance towards Bilbao had to pass through it.[12] Wolfram von Richthofen's war diary entry for 26 April 1937 states, "K/88 [the Condor Legion bomber force] was targeted at Guernica in order to halt and disrupt the Red withdrawal which has to pass through here." Under the German concept of tactical bombing, areas that were routes of transportation and troop movement were considered legitimate military targets. The following day, Richthofen wrote in his war diary, "Guernica burning."[13] The Republican retreat towards Bilbao passed through Guernica before and after the bombing.

Guernica was a quiet village. The nearest military target of any consequence was a factory on its outskirts which manufactured various war products and went through the attack unscathed. Thus, the attack was widely condemned as a terror bombing.[14][15]

Because a majority of Guernica's men were away, fighting on behalf of the Republicans, at the time of the bombing the town was populated mostly by women and children.[16] These demographics are reflected in Guernica. As Rudolf Arnheim writes, for Picasso: "The women and children make Guernica the image of innocent, defenseless humanity victimized. Also, women and children have often been presented by Picasso as the very perfection of mankind. An assault on women and children is, in Picasso's view, directed at the core of mankind."[8]

The Times journalist George Steer, a Basque and Republican sympathizer, propelled this event onto the international scene and brought it to Pablo Picasso's attention. Steer's eyewitness account was published on 28 April in both The Times and The New York Times, and on the 29th it appeared in L'Humanité, a French Communist daily. Steer wrote:

Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of their cultural tradition, was completely destroyed yesterday afternoon by insurgent air raiders. The bombardment of this open town far behind the lines occupied precisely three hours and a quarter, during which a powerful fleet of aeroplanes consisting of three types of German types, Junkers and Heinkel bombers, did not cease unloading on the town bombs weighing from 1,000 lbs. downwards and, it is calculated, more than 3,000 two-pounder aluminium incendiary projectiles. The fighters, meanwhile, plunged low from above the centre of the town to machinegun those of the civilian population who had taken refuge in the fields."[16]

Picasso lived in Paris during the occupation during World War II. A German officer allegedly asked him, upon seeing a photo of Guernica in Picasso's apartment, "Did you do that?" Picasso responded, "No, you did."[17]

Guernica was painted using a matte house paint specially formulated at Picasso's request to have the least possible gloss.[1] American artist John Ferren assisted him in stretching the monumental canvas,[18] and photographer Dora Maar, who had been working with Picasso since mid-1936 photographing his studio and teaching him the technique of cameraless photography,[19] documented its creation. Apart from their documentary and publicity value, Maar's photographs "helped Picasso to eschew color and give the work the black-and-white immediacy of a photograph", according to art historian John Richardson.[1][20]

Picasso, who rarely allowed strangers into his studio to watch him work, admitted influential visitors to observe his progress on Guernica, believing that the publicity would help the antifascist cause.[1] As his work on the mural progressed, Picasso explained: "The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death? ... In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death."[21]

Picasso worked on the painting for 35 days, and finished it on 4 June 1937.[1]

The scene occurs within a room where, on the left, a wide-eyed bull stands over a grieving woman holding a dead child in her arms. In the center of the room a horse falls in agony with a large gaping hole in its side, as if it had just been run through by a spear or javelin. The horse appears to be wearing chain mail armor, decorated with vertical tally marks arranged in rows.

A dead and dismembered soldier lies under the horse. The hand of his severed right arm grasps a shattered sword, from which a flower grows. The open palm of the soldier's left hand contains a stigmata, a symbol of martyrdom derived from the stigmata of Christ. A bare light bulb in the shape of an eye blazes over the suffering horse's head.

To the horse's upper right a frightened female figure appears to have floated into the room through a window, and witnesses the scene. She carries a flame-lit lamp, and holds it near the bare bulb. From the right, below the floating figure, an awe-struck woman staggers towards the center, looking into the blazing light bulb with a blank stare.

Daggers that suggest screaming have replaced the tongues of the horse, the bull, and the grieving woman. A dove is scribed on the wall behind the bull, part of its body comprising a crack in the wall through which bright light shines.

On the far right another woman, her arms raised in terror, is entrapped by fire from above and below. Her right hand suggests the shape of an airplane. A dark wall with an open door defines the right side of the room.

Two "hidden" images formed by the horse appear in Guernica:

A human skull overlays the horse's body.

A bull appears to gore the horse from underneath. The bull's head is formed mainly by the horse's entire front leg which has the knee on the ground. The leg's knee cap forms the head's nose. A horn appears within the horse's breast.The bull's tail forms the image of a flame with smoke rising from it, seemingly appearing in a window created by the lighter shade of gray surrounding it.

Interpretations of Guernica vary widely and contradict one another. This extends, for example, to the mural's two dominant elements: the bull and the horse. Art historian Patricia Failing said, "The bull and the horse are important characters in Spanish culture. Picasso himself certainly used these characters to play many different roles over time. This has made the task of interpreting the specific meaning of the bull and the horse very tough. Their relationship is a kind of ballet that was conceived in a variety of ways throughout Picasso's career."

When pressed to explain the elements in Guernica, Picasso said,

...this bull is a bull and this horse is a horse... If you give a meaning to certain things in my paintings it may be very true, but it is not my idea to give this meaning. What ideas and conclusions you have got I obtained too, but instinctively, unconsciously. I make the painting for the painting. I paint the objects for what they are.[22]

In The Dream and Lie of Franco, a series of narrative sketches Picasso also created for the World's Fair, Franco is depicted as a monster that first devours his own horse and later does battle with an angry bull. Work on these illustrations began before the bombing of Guernica, and four additional panels were added, three of which relate directly to the Guernica mural.

According to scholar Beverly Ray, the following list of interpretations reflects the general consensus of historians: "The shape and posture of the bodies express protest"; "Picasso uses black, white, and grey paint to set a somber mood and express pain and chaos"; "flaming buildings and crumbling walls not only express the destruction of Guernica, but reflect the destructive power of civil war"; "the newspaper print used in the painting reflects how Picasso learned of the massacre"; "The light bulb in the painting represents the sun"; and "The broken sword near the bottom of the painting symbolizes the defeat of the people at the hand of their tormentors".[10]

Alejandro Escalona said, "The chaos unfolding seems to happen in closed quarters provoking an intense feeling of oppression. There is no way out of the nightmarish cityscape. The absence of color makes the violent scene developing right before your eyes even more horrifying. The blacks, whites, and grays startle you—especially because you are used to see war images broadcast live and in high-definition right to your living room."[23]

In drawing attention to a number of preliminary studies, the so-called primary project,[24] that show an atelier installation incorporating the central triangular shape which reappears in the final version of Guernica, Becht-Jördens and Wehmeier interpret the painting as a self-referential composition in the tradition of atelier paintings such as Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez. In his chef d'oeuvre, Picasso seems to be trying to define his role and his power as an artist in the face of political power and violence. But far from being a mere political painting, Guernica should be seen as Picasso's comment on what art can actually contribute towards the self-assertion that liberates every human being and protects the individual against overwhelming forces such as political crime, war, and death.[25]

Guernica was unveiled and initially exhibited in July 1937 at the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition.[26], where Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia had huge pavilions. The Pavilion, which was financed by the Spanish Republican government at the time of civil war, was built to exhibit the Spanish government's struggle for existence contrary to the Exposition's technology theme. The Pavilion's entrance presented an enormous photographic mural of Republican soldiers accompanied by the slogan:

At its unveiling at the Paris Exhibition it garnered little attention. The public's reaction to Guernica was mixed.[27]Max Aub, one of the officials in charge of the Spanish pavilion, was compelled to defend the work against a group of Spanish officials who objected to the mural's modernist style and sought to replace it with a more traditional painting that was also commissioned for the exhibition, Madrid 1937 (Black Aeroplanes) by Horacio Ferrer de Morgado.[1] Some Marxist groups criticized Picasso's painting as lacking in political commitment and faulted it for not offering a vision of a better future.[28] In contrast, Morgado's painting was a great success with Spanish Communists and with the public.[1] The art critic Clement Greenberg was also critical of Guernica, but for different reasons.[29] In a later essay, Greenberg termed Guernica "jerky" and "too compressed for its size", and compared it unfavorably to the "magnificently lyrical" The Charnel House (1944–48), a later antiwar painting by Picasso.[30]

Among the painting's admirers were the art critic Jean Cassou and the poet José Bergamín, both of whom praised the painting as quintessentially Spanish.[31]Michel Leiris perceived in the painting a foreshadowing: "On a black and white canvas that depicts ancient tragedy ... Picasso also writes our letter of doom: all that we love is going to be lost..."[32]

Guernica, for which Picasso was paid 200,000 francs for his costs by the Spanish Republican government, was one of the few major paintings that were not sold directly from artist to his exclusive contracted art dealer and friend, Paul Rosenberg.[33]

However, after its exhibition Rosenberg organised a four-man extravaganza Scandinavian tour of 118 works by Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Henri Laurens. The main attraction was Guernica, and from January to April 1938 the tour visited Oslo, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Göteborg. In September 1938 the painting travelled to England, exhibited in London's Whitechapel Art Gallery organized by Roland Penrose with Clement Attlee, where it arrived on 30 September 1938, the same day the Munich Agreement was signed by the leaders of the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Germany. It then travelled onwards to Leeds, Liverpool and in early 1939 Manchester. There, Manchester Foodship For Spain, a group of artists and activists engaged in sending aid to the people of Spain, exhibited the painting in the HE Nunn & Co Ford automobile showroom for two weeks.[34] It then returned briefly to France.

After the victory of Francisco Franco in Spain, the painting was sent to the United States to raise funds and support for Spanish refugees. The San Francisco Museum of Art (later SFMOMA) gave the work its first public, free appearance in the United States from 27 August to 19 September 1939. The Museum of Modern Art in New York City then mounted a Picasso exhibition on 15 November 1939 that remained on view until 7 January 1940, entitled: Picasso: 40 Years of His Art, that was organized by Alfred H. Barr in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago. The exhibition contained 344 works, including Guernica and its studies.[35]

At Picasso's request the safekeeping of the piece was entrusted to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, as it was Picasso's expressed desire that the painting should not be delivered to Spain until liberty and democracy had been established in the country.[5] Between 1939 and 1952, the painting traveled extensively in the United States; between 1953 and 1956 it was shown in Brazil, at the first-ever Picasso retrospective in Milan, Italy, and then in numerous other major European cities, before returning to MoMA for a retrospective celebrating Picasso's 75th birthday. It then went on to Chicago and Philadelphia. By this time, concern for the state of the painting resulted in a decision to keep it in one place: a room on MoMA's third floor, where it was accompanied by several of Picasso's preliminary studies and some of Dora Maar's photographs of the work in progress. The studies and photos were often loaned for other exhibitions, but until 1981, Guernica itself remained at MoMA.[5]

During the Vietnam War, the room containing the painting became the site of occasional anti-war vigils. These were usually peaceful and uneventful, but on 28 February 1974, Tony Shafrazi—ostensibly protesting Second Lieutenant William Calley's petition for habeas corpus following his indictment and sentencing for the murder of 109 Vietnamese civilians during the My Lai massacre—defaced the painting with red spray paint, painting the words "KILL LIES ALL"; the paint was removed with relative ease from the varnished surface.[36]

As early as 1968, Franco had expressed an interest in having Guernica come to Spain.[5] However, Picasso refused to allow this until the Spanish people again enjoyed a republic. He later added other conditions, such as the restoration of "public liberties and democratic institutions". Picasso died in 1973. Franco, ten years Picasso's junior, died two years later, in 1975. After Franco's death, Spain was transformed into a democratic constitutional monarchy, ratified by a new constitution in 1978. However, MoMA was reluctant to give up one of its greatest treasures and argued that a monarchy did not represent the republic that had been stipulated in Picasso's will as a condition for the painting's delivery. Under great pressure from a number of observers, MoMA finally ceded the painting to Spain in 1981. The Spanish historian Javier Tusell was one of the negotiators.

Upon its arrival in Spain in September 1981,[37] it was first displayed behind bomb-and bullet-proof glass screens[38] at the Casón del Buen Retiro in Madrid in time to celebrate the centenary of Picasso's birth, 25 October.[37] The exhibition was visited by almost a million people in the first year.[39] Since that time there has never been any attempted vandalism or other security threat to the painting.

A tiled wall in Gernika claims "Guernica" Gernikara, "The Guernica (painting) to Gernika."

In 1992, the painting was moved from the Museo del Prado to a purpose-built gallery at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, both in Madrid, along with about two dozen preparatory works.[40] This action was controversial in Spain, since Picasso's will stated that the painting should be displayed at the Prado. However, the move was part of a transfer of all of the Prado's collections of art after the early 19th century to other nearby buildings in the city for reasons of space; the Reina Sofía, which houses the capital's national collection of 20th-century art, was the natural place to move it to.
At the Reina Sofía, the painting has roughly the same protection as any other work.[41]

Basque nationalists have advocated that the picture should be brought to the Basque country,[42] especially after the building of the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum. Officials at the Reina Sofía claim[43] that the canvas is now thought to be too fragile to move. Even the staff of the Guggenheim do not see a permanent transfer of the painting as possible, although the Basque government continues to support the possibility of a temporary exhibition in Bilbao.[41]

On 5 February 2003 a large blue curtain was placed to cover this work at the UN, so that it would not be visible in the background when Colin Powell and John Negroponte gave press conferences at the United Nations.[47] On the following day, it was claimed that the curtain was placed there at the request of television news crews, who had complained that the wild lines and screaming figures made for a bad backdrop, and that a horse's hindquarters appeared just above the faces of any speakers. Some diplomats, however, in talks with journalists claimed that the Bush Administration pressured UN officials to cover the tapestry, rather than have it in the background while Powell or other US diplomats argued for war on Iraq.[4] In a critique of the covering, columnist Alejandro Escalona hypothesized that Guernica's "unappealing ménage of mutilated bodies and distorted faces proved to be too strong for articulating to the world why the US was going to war in Iraq", while referring to the work as "an inconvenient masterpiece."[23]

On 17 March 2009, Deputy Spokesperson for the Secretary-General Marie Okabe announced that the Guernica tapestry had been moved to a gallery in London in advance of extensive renovations at UN Headquarters. The Guernica tapestry was the showcase piece for the grand reopening of the Whitechapel Gallery. It was located in the 'Guernica room' which was originally part of the old Whitechapel Library.[48] In 2012 the tapestry was on temporary loan to the San Antonio Museum of Art in San Antonio, Texas from the Rockefeller family.[49]
It was returned to the UN by March 2015.[50]

Guernica is to painting what Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is to music: a culturalicon that speaks to mankind not only against war but also of hope and peace.It is a reference when speaking about genocide from El Salvador to Bosnia.

Alejandro Escalona, on the 75th anniversary of the painting's creation[23]

During the 1970s, Guernica was a symbol for Spaniards of both the end of the Franco regime following Franco's death, and of Basque nationalism. The Basque left has repeatedly used imagery from the picture. An example is the organization Etxerat, which uses a reversed image of the lamp as its symbol.[51]

In 2016, the British art critic Jonathan Jones called the painting a "Cubist apocalypse" and stated that Picasso "was trying to show the truth so viscerally and permanently that it could outstare the daily lies of the age of dictators."[52][53]

Guernica has become a universal and powerful symbol warning humanity against the suffering and devastation of war.[23] Moreover, the fact that there are no obvious references to the specific attack has contributed to making its message universal and timeless.[23]